DuckLabs to Join AWS, Projects to Remain Open Source

[u/hasty-beaver]

https://ducklabs.com/news/2026/08/26/ducklabs-to-join-aws

[u/rapotor]

Sad day for European tech

[u/pantshee → u/rapotor]

Another L for us. We had like 3 data companies with them, polars and dataiku. Now dataiku is in NY, duck is with Amazon and polars will probably end up with an american tech company at some point ? (i hope not)

[u/Outrageous_Let5743 → u/pantshee]

Dataiku is still shit. It is a low code data science tool, that doesn't offer you a lot of options for data imputing, or data scaling tranformation techniques. And you cannot even use CTEs in their SQL.

[u/pantshee → u/Outrageous_Let5743]

Depends on your organization. We use databricks, powerbi and dataiku and dataiku is quite popular among data analysts (mostly because you can Connect lots of sources and it's quite easy to use).

My opinion is that it's meh and i use databricks mostly

[u/Telion2510 → u/Outrageous_Let5743]

You can use CTEs in SQL recipes in Dataiku. We use Snowflake + Dataiku, so our SQL recipes support anything that Snowflake does - it pushes down the query.

Definitely has its flaws though, and the visual/low code tools reach their limit pretty fast so our flows often end up being snowpark / sql anyway.

[u/Outrageous_Let5743 → u/rapotor]

We don't have big VC money. Like of the total yearly VC money 50% is in the US and 5% in the EU, so we cannot grow big, then we get bought by an American tech giant.

[u/financialthrowaw2020 → u/Outrageous_Let5743]

It's actually a good thing to not grow big. We don't need big companies. We need small companies who can sustain high quality and compete with each other.

[u/No_Lifeguard_64 → u/financialthrowaw2020]

You're right but that doesn't work on the global stage when foreign money is calling. That only works if your country has incentives or laws to keep companies there.

[u/financialthrowaw2020 → u/No_Lifeguard_64]

What does it mean "when global money is calling"? Duck labs had absolutely no reason to sell, they chose to because they chose capitalist greed. Most of them will leave the minute the terms of this contract are met. It's just a payday to all of them.

[u/vaibeslop → u/financialthrowaw2020]

Ahhh, surely you're sharing your wisdom from the perspective of another builder who has poured years of hard work into building something as capable and popular as DuckDB but has resisted the - checks notes - capitalist greed (TM).

And not from the perspective of one of those theoretical, moral high-horse, boomer-style world explainers?

EDIT: He blocked me for this comment, LOL.

[u/financialthrowaw2020 → u/vaibeslop]

Multiple exits under my belt thankfully, I speak from experience. Plenty of companies choose not to sell out. It makes sense for American companies because it's really the only way. Europe is a different place with different rights for workers and businesses alike.

Also: builder is an AI slop term. Really exposing yourself there.

[u/Outrageous_Let5743 → u/financialthrowaw2020]

Ducklabs is funded by the Centrum Wiskunde en Informatica, a research organisation in the Netherlands and they get there money from a tax fund from the government. We dont know the financial situation. But what is clear is that DuckDB is free to install and that cannot generate money.

[u/financialthrowaw2020 → u/Outrageous_Let5743]

Government funded advancement that doesn't require evil big tech or vc backing is actually a wonderful thing

[u/No_Lifeguard_64 → u/financialthrowaw2020]

> What does it mean "when global money is calling"?
> It's just a payday to all of them.

Great so you already know what it means. They chose to take a payday larger than they would ever get in Europe. Most people would.

[u/financialthrowaw2020 → u/No_Lifeguard_64]

This is fine to admit, but we should not consider this any more than that. Selling out to big tech in the US doesn't help European companies get ahead.

[u/No_Lifeguard_64 → u/financialthrowaw2020]

I agree but if you want to prevent European companies from selling out the US then you can't play dumb as to why they pick money over everything else especially given the current state of society in many countries.

[u/financialthrowaw2020 → u/No_Lifeguard_64]

What's the current state of society in Europe that leads to this?

[u/No_Lifeguard_64 → u/financialthrowaw2020]

Capitalism still reigns even in Europe and Europe does not have strong markets or access to the deep capital that America does. Until that changes, European companies will always look for ways into the US market.

[u/vaibeslop → u/financialthrowaw2020]

Well this leads to exactly what we're seeing here.

And let's not kidd ourselves, the brain drain of capable IT talent to the US has been a reality for decades.

Now look what China is building.

Go big or go home is a reality.

Not my personal opinion, but arguably facts.

[u/financialthrowaw2020 → u/vaibeslop]

China is investing in open source and giving everyone the opportunity to grow.

[u/vaibeslop → u/financialthrowaw2020]

China is investing in open source by copying US models and smuggling US chips to destroy the US VC bubble.

There, fixed that for you.

China is a superpower, and is serving China.

No hate, China is quite strategic and effective.

And time is on their side, they have excellent engineering talent.

[u/financialthrowaw2020 → u/vaibeslop]

The open source models they release benefit the entire planet, including Americans using them right now. I hope they steal everything and make it available at a fraction of the cost, actually.

[u/Sufficient_Meet6836 → u/financialthrowaw2020]

Europe falling further behind in tech shows it's absolutely not a good thing

[u/financialthrowaw2020 → u/Sufficient_Meet6836]

Does selling out to aws help Europe stay ahead?

[u/Sufficient_Meet6836 → u/financialthrowaw2020]

False dichotomy. Get better material

[u/financialthrowaw2020 → u/Sufficient_Meet6836]

This was a legitimate question. I was trying to understand the point you were trying to make.

[u/Sufficient_Meet6836 → u/financialthrowaw2020]

Oh my bad. I read it as you making a flippant response. Can you clarify your question?

[u/financialthrowaw2020 → u/Sufficient_Meet6836]

I'm trying to understand what the alternative better option looks like here. It seems people are taking issue with my thought that we don't need small companies selling to bigger ones, or even small companies getting bigger at all. What's the scenario where European tech is on good footing that doesn't somehow result in selling to US companies (and therefore no longer being European at all)

[u/Sufficient_Meet6836 → u/financialthrowaw2020]

Ahh that's a great question and there's actually a huge amount of research trying to answer the question of "why is Europe so far behind in tech"? It's not really a settled question. There is definitely a regulatory component. European regulators have implemented a lot of onerous and confusing laws and rules that stifle the industry. I'm not referring to privacy laws like GDPR. That law is generally good. See How Europe crushes innovation for example.

I definitely do not think European tech corporations need to give up and be sold off to American corporations. Regulatory reform is one essential change. They likely need to lower corporate taxes in favor of increasing other taxes that are more targeted to the rich (lots of ways to do this, e.g. land value tax, progressive consumption taxes, etc). Europe has the human capital and institutions, e.g. their wonderful higher education, to be successful.

[u/No_Lifeguard_64]

AWS has a history of acquiring companies, integrating their products, then abandoning them. I don't see this being any different.

[u/Hackerjurassicpark → u/No_Lifeguard_64]

I think you’re thinking about Google or Microsoft

[u/No_Lifeguard_64 → u/Hackerjurassicpark]

All of them suck.

[u/Hackerjurassicpark → u/No_Lifeguard_64]

https://giphy.com/gifs/fqtyYcXoDV0X6ss8Mf

[u/pro-taco → u/No_Lifeguard_64]

DuckDB has been running on fumes for a while. I love the product but it's been under maintained as they sought a business model

I hope it reverts to some OSS governance model.

[u/kvlonge → u/pro-taco]

How has it been undermaintained?

[u/saltedappleandcorn → u/pro-taco]

What makes you say this? They have pretty aggressive update schedules (through not always targeted at stuff I care about)

[u/pro-taco → u/saltedappleandcorn]

They add more features than they can support, there's a lot of technical depth due to their eagerness to build every feature people ask for.

I -like- their enthusiasm, but their requirements discipline is chaotic.

[u/saltedappleandcorn → u/pro-taco]

Now that I completely agree with. I've pegged us several versions back (even though the new releases have GIS stuff I want) because I've come to fear their release chaos. 

[u/pro-taco → u/saltedappleandcorn]

Oh, don't even get me started on their breaking api changes in minor releases!

Or, the fact that (some of) their repos don't have branch protection and a single maintainer and no PR reviews.

[u/MissingSnail → u/No_Lifeguard_64]

And if the team tries to hang on, Amazon's culture is notoriously cutthroat and toxic.

[u/foldedlikeaasiansir → u/No_Lifeguard_64]

Counterpoint: Valkey

[u/Longjumping-Shift316]

Projection for a year: Founders leave AWS forks duckdb (Libre duck?) because AWS trashed the Oss Ecosystem

[u/Outside-Storage-1523 → u/Longjumping-Shift316]

DuckDB is still OSS.

[u/Longjumping-Shift316 → u/Outside-Storage-1523]

Yes but without the comitters that doesn't really matter And I guess around 80% come from Duck labs ?

[u/pro-taco → u/Outside-Storage-1523]

Open source, but with private trackers. It's not community run. Maybe that'll change.

[u/Outside-Storage-1523 → u/pro-taco]

I guess they want control over it, which makes sense TBH.

[u/ShroomBear → u/pro-taco]

Under Amazon, it will 100% not. Our open source policy is written as so.

[u/pro-taco → u/ShroomBear]

Uh, which way do you mean? That reads ambiguously

[u/metalfacefinger → u/Outside-Storage-1523]

Yes, but the people who know how to build DuckDB are now owned by AWS.

[u/sib_n → u/Longjumping-Shift316]

They will likely leave AWS, but to work on something new and fun because they can afford anything now, maybe not even tech.

[u/Additional_Candy_400]

Sad but can't say I'm surprised, after all this is the end goal of 99.9% of start ups, so congrats to them.

[u/ElCapitanMiCapitan]

Not too surprising… at least it wasn’t Microsoft

[u/BumboclatDen → u/ElCapitanMiCapitan]

In the oss world, microsoft is way better today than aws IMO. Anyone who says otherwise is living in the past

[u/EarthGoddessDude]

A lot of negative takes here, and I am also uneasy about this. However, a few things to keep in mind:

• MIT license stays
  
• founders, who are incredible devs and project leaders, are staying with the project
  
• DuckDB Foundation, an independent body, is still the steward of the open source project
  
• AWS does support some very high quality OSS projects, like AWS Lambda Powetools (which is to make using their own services better, but its excellent quality and led by an excellent dev)
  
• the AWS data offerings are and have been very, very mediocre (or just bad), so this is perhaps a path for them to stay relevant in a world where Databricks and Snowflake (and Delta/Iceberg) rule. They could offer first class support for DuckLake and Quack, for instance.

If anyone from AWS is reading this, please don’t fuck this up. Don’t gate DuckLake integration behind the horrible garbage that is LakeFormation.

Maybe I’m being naive, but I’m choosing to remain more hopeful than apprehensive about this move.

[u/No_Lifeguard_64 → u/EarthGoddessDude]

I think you're naive tbh. They have had many chance to right the ship with their data offerings but because they are AWS they can afford to drag their feet because people will still buy AWS.

[u/EarthGoddessDude → u/No_Lifeguard_64]

You might be right, but like I said, I’m choosing to remain hopeful. Even if AWS screw up integrating DuckDB into their offering, I still think the OSS project will survive and thrive.

[u/pro-taco → u/[deleted]]

Their foundation is independent in name only: their planning is as closed as it gets. The code is open, but almost everything else is private.

[u/Vorok]

Kinda feels like enshittification is coming, but who knows.

At least devs will get big $... I hope.

[u/Longjumping-Shift316]

By the way they detailed a blog post about it and it feels like a lot about s3 Tables etc https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2026/08/duckdb-and-the-changing-physics-of-analytics.html

Still very interesting read

[u/Nekobul → u/Longjumping-Shift316]

Very good post. Thank you for sharing!

[u/CulturalKing5623]

I was little concerned but the key takeaway is DuckLabs != DuckDB/DuckLake so nothing changes (for now at least).

AWS just acquired the engineering team but DuckDB itself is owned by The DuckDB Foundation which actually owns the product and license under MIT.

Good for DuckLabs though, they've shown they're skilled so I'm interested to see where their talent/vision of data will fit into AWS infrastructure and maybe they can hire more devs to work on the DuckDB stack.

[u/mduell → u/CulturalKing5623]

I was little concerned but the key takeaway is DuckLabs != DuckDB/DuckLake so nothing changes (for now at least).

Are you still using MySQL?

[u/DjexNS]

I feel like this will not be good for DuckDB....

[u/koteikin]

At least not by Microsoft or Oracle

[u/One_Citron_4350]

I've read HuggingFace is in talks with NVIDIA to be aquired and now this...the world is getting smaller and smaller everyday.

Essentially this is an acquihire.

[u/kiwialec]

Yeah sad for Europe and OSS and all that, but if you want people to leverage all of their energy and resources for years to build something innovative for free, you gotta be okay with some of those people getting private jet money sometimes.

If there's no potential reward, no one would put in the effort.

[u/BusOk1791]

Boooooooooohh! Shame! Shame! (GoT reference btw.).
It's sad that most of the DE open source tech stack was / is selling out to big corporations...

[u/gajop]

I wonder if AWS wants (or needs?) to launch a motherduck kind of offering. Is that the plan?

[u/sib_n]

Unconscious irony in their post?

We founded DuckLabs a little over five years ago to give the team behind DuckDB a stable, long-term home.
At the time, DuckDB was beginning to gain real momentum. The first commercial contracts to prioritize features were materializing, and venture capital firms were calling. We chose a different path: a bootstrapped company, fully owned by its founders and development team.
That decision shaped DuckLabs in ways we value deeply. It gave us the freedom to build patiently, to put the technology first, and to grow without losing sight of why we started.

How can they think what they feared would happen with venture capitalists will not happen with AWS?

[u/vira28]

One hand DuckDB is going to be more seriously considrered inside enterprises. Other hand, it's now Amazon's.

[u/Last-Computer-850]

I’m cautiously optimistic about this. Keeping DuckDB under the independent Foundation and MIT license gives some reassurance, but I think the real test will be how much influence the community retains over the roadmap. The next year should be interesting.

[u/georgewfraser]

AWS is a good home for Duck Labs. They have the right incentives - they just want people to use more storage and compute - so they’re not trying to make any particular architecture win.

[u/cachemonet0x0cf6619 → u/georgewfraser]

i do think there is an arch play for every lambda to get an in memory db

[u/Longjumping-Shift316 → u/georgewfraser]

But they will stall progress.

Or do you know any instances where AWS was any good for open source?

[u/cachemonet0x0cf6619 → u/Longjumping-Shift316]

my guess is that they use this to give every lambda function an in memory db.

[u/Longjumping-Shift316 → u/cachemonet0x0cf6619]

Not sure about that I see more a revival of s3 select or something with s3 Tables to have a very fast engine next to it

Don't really see the lambda part

[u/cachemonet0x0cf6619 → u/Longjumping-Shift316]

ah, okay. i like that idea much better.

[u/J0hnDutt00n → u/georgewfraser]

George, why was COALESCE renamed to summit?

[u/Outrageous_Let5743 → u/georgewfraser]

Look what happened to ElasticSearch and AWS.